Paper short abstract:

The landscape management practices of Trio horticulturalists and Akuriyo foragers have played an important role in these native Amazonians' recent history of vast social change. This role is considered here in terms of native concepts of personhood and ownership.

Paper long abstract:

The Trio and Akuriyo of southern Suriname are swidden horticulturalists and hunter-gatherers, who understand the relationship between man and environment in terms of histories of interpersonal relations, in which the ownership of persons plays a key role. With reference to this native perspective, I will outline the history of the landscape dwelt in and fashioned by the Trio and Akuriyo since contact with non-Amerindians intensified in the 1950s. The initial intensification of resource use was accompanied by missionary-instigated cosmological changes, while Akuriyo foragers were taught to adopt agriculture; yet recent evidence shows that the Trio's preference for small settlements and the Akuriyo's preference for foraging persist. In bringing to the fore the relationship between colonial or postcolonial forces for change and native preferences based on traditional landscape management practices, this material raises various questions for historical ecology and for archaeology. Selection of a new place for a village may involve a form of native archaeology, but at the same time many traces of native historical meaning in the landscape may be invisible to the conventional archaeologist. Meanwhile, as history makes its mark on the landscape, its motive forces may be those either for change or for continuity. My discussion, presenting the perspective of an anthropologist, will make reference to new archaeological research among the Trio.